selected vocal arrangements of irish folksongs

245 Pages·2012·6.24 MB·English

SELECTED VOCAL ARRANGEMENTS OF IRISH FOLKSONGS:
A HISTORY, STYLISTIC ANALYSIS, REPERTOIRE LIST,
AND GUIDE TO PERFORMANCE AND PEDAGOGY

BY HUGH CONOR ANGELL

Submitted to the faculty of the
Jacobs School of Music in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree,
Doctor of Music
Indiana University
December, 2012
Accepted by the faculty of the Jacobs School of Music,
Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree Doctor of Music.

______________________________
Mary Ann Hart, Research Director

______________________________
Andreas Poulimenos, Chairperson

______________________________
Daniel Melamed

______________________________
Patricia Stiles
ii
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my committee members for their great help. My research
director, Professor Mary Ann Hart, has inspired me by her knowledge and love of song
and her ability to make any vocal repertoire seem interesting. My teacher, Professor
Andreas Poulimenos, has been an excellent instructor and mentor, consistently providing
me with guidance for singing, teaching, and life. I am also very grateful to Dr. Daniel
Melamed and Professor Patricia Stiles, both inspiring teachers in their respective areas,
whose examples I hope to follow in my teaching.
I especially appreciate the encouragement and interest of my parents, John and
Becky Angell, and my grandmothers, Marjorie Angell and Margery Minor. Most of all, I
thank my wife Kerri for supporting and loving me as I completed this project.

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . iii
LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES . . . . . . . v
CHAPTER
1. INTRODUCTION TO IRISH FOLKSONG . . . . 1
What is the scope of this study? . . . . . 2
What is folk music? . . . . . . . 3
What is Irish music? . . . . . . . 5
Irish folksong and classical vocal repertoire . . . . 8
What is involved in arranging Irish folk music? . . . 13
How should classical voice teachers use Irish music? . . 24

2. HISTORY OF COLLECTING IRISH MELODIES . . . 26
3. HISTORY OF ARRANGING IRISH MELODIES . . . 45
4. ANNOTATED SELECTED FOLKSONGS BY COMPOSER . . 72
Beethoven . . . . . . . . 72
Davis and Hudson . . . . . . . 81
Moffat . . . . . . . . . 81
Stanford . . . . . . . . 86
Somervell . . . . . . . . 96
Wood . . . . . . . . . 97
Esposito and Shaw . . . . . . . 103
Harty . . . . . . . . . 105
Hughes . . . . . . . . 107
Quilter and Britten . . . . . . . 117
Moeran . . . . . . . . 121
Cole . . . . . . . . . 123
Friel . . . . . . . . . 126
Edmunds and Bowles . . . . . . . 129
Nelson . . . . . . . . . 133
Recent Arrangements . . . . . . . 135
APPENDIX
A. ALL SURVEYED SONG TITLES, ALPHABETICAL . . . 138
B. ALL SURVEYED SONG TITLES, BY COMPOSER. . . . 174
C. ALL ARRANGEMENTS OF THOMAS MOORE IRISH MELODIES . 210
D. ALL SURVEYED MELODIES WITH MULTIPLE SETTINGS. . 220
E. IRISH GAELIC PRONUNCIATION. . . . . . 225
F. IRISH WORKS FOR FURTHER STUDY. . . . . 229

BIBLIOGRAPHY. . . . . . . . . . 232
iv
LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

Ex. 1: Friel, “The Little Red Fox,” mm. 1-9. . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Ex. 2: Stanford, “Let Erin Remember the Days of Old,” mm. 1-7. . . . . . . 10
Ex. 3: Stanford, “Oh! Blame Not the Bard,” mm. 1-10. . . . . . . . . . 17
Ex. 4: Hughes, “The Verdant Braes of Skreen,” mm. 1-7. . . . . . . . . 18
Ex. 5: Harty,“My Lagan Love,” mm. 1-5. . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Ex. 6: Bunting, “Paddy O Rafferty” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Ex. 7: Beethoven, “Oh Harp of Erin,” mm. 1-12. . . . . . . . . . . 74
Ex. 8: Beethoven, “No More, My Mary, I Sigh for Splendour,” mm. 4-7. . . . . 78
Ex. 9: Moffat, “Sleep On, for I Know ‘Tis of Me You Are Dreaming,” mm. 13-20 . . 85
Ex. 10: Stanford, “The Song of Fionnuala,” mm. 4-12. . . . . . . . . . 91
Ex. 11: Stanford, “The Death of Oscar,” mm. 18-21. . . . . . . . . . 95
Ex. 12: Wood, “They Know Not My Heart,” mm. 6-17 . . . . . . . . . 99
Ex. 13: Hughes, “Must I Go Bound?” mm. 4-12. . . . . . . . . . .111
Ex. 14: Hughes, “The Red-Haired Man’s Wife, mm. 1-2. . . . . . . . .114
Ex. 15: Britten, “At the Mid Hour of Night,” mm. 9-18 . . . . . . . . .120
Ex. 16: Moeran, “The Roving Dingle Boy,” mm. 64-74 . . . . . . . . .122
Ex. 17: Cole, “The Bard of Armagh,” mm. 1-12. . . . . . . . . . .126
Ex. 18: Edmunds, “I Know My Love,” mm. 13-21. . . . . . . . . . .130
Ex. 19: Bowles, “Ar an dTaobh Thall den Ghóilín,” mm. 5-18 . . . . . . .132
Ex. 20: Corigliano, “The Foggy Dew,” mm. 49-57. . . . . . . . . .137

v
INTRODUCTION
After I moved to the United States from Ireland in 1998, I sang an unaccompanied
Irish folksong entitled “Thugamar féin an samhradh linn” for the North Carolina high
school vocal solo contest. A judge commented, “Nicely sung; but we would like to hear
something from the standard repertoire next time.”
For a variety of reasons, folksongs are only part of the classical vocal canon if
they have been arranged by a recognized classical composer and translated into one of the
standard languages of classical vocal literature. The melody of “Thugamar féin an
samhradh linn” was set to English words by Thomas Moore and published as “Come,
Send Round the Wine” in Sir John Stevenson’s famous volume, Moore’s Irish Melodies
in the early 1800s. If I had sung the Stevenson arrangement of the same song for state
contest, my choice would have fallen within the favored canon. This project is
undertaken with the belief that Irish folksongs can find a place in classical voice studios
if teachers are directed to the best sources and arrangements.
The primary purpose of this study is to identify arrangements of Irish folksongs
by eminent classical composers, with primary attention to compilations that are available
to teachers today. I will provide background on the melodies and composers; stylistic
analysis of the settings; commentary on the texts; and recommendations for performance
and pedagogy, including a discussion of diction, level of difficulty, age appropriateness,
programming options, and recommended editions. To prepare repertoire for informed
performance, it is beneficial for students and teachers to know some of the history related
to the traditional melody and/or text. For this purpose, I will identify primary sources
such as the Bunting and Petrie collections of folksongs, and will explore the canon of
1
2

Irish folksongs that was established by collectors and used as a source by classical
composers. This study prioritizes the melody over the text: traditional texts with newly
composed melodies are not included, while traditional melodies with newly composed
texts are included. I will list folksongs that have received more than one important
setting, so that a teacher may choose, for example, between the Britten setting of a
specific song, and the Beethoven, Wood or Stanford arrangement of the same song.

What is the scope of this study?
This study is meant to help teachers and performers of classical voice find
repertoire based on Irish folksongs. There are many related genres that will not be
surveyed in this study, including the following: music that is widely identified as popular
rather than classical in style, and is not accepted in classical voice studios (for example:
Christy Moore, Tom Clancy, Clannad, Dubliners, etc); melodies that were written by a
specific, classically trained composer, reflecting a learned tradition rather than oral
tradition (for example: Irish composer G. Molyneux Palmer’s settings of James Joyce’s
Chamber Music poetry; or the many settings of Thomas Moore’s poetry to music other
than Irish traditional melodies, as in the songs of Berlioz, Spontini, Schumann, Ives,
Bolcom, Laitman, and Duparc); and music that is out-of-print and unavailable,
representing an impractical repertoire choice for voice teachers.
In this study, the adjectives “folk” and “traditional” are used interchangeably,
although the latter term began to gain preference in academic circles beginning in the
1980s.
3

What is folk music?
“There are in this small Island two nations: the Irish (or Gaelic) nation, and the
Pale. The Irish nation, tiny as it is at the moment, has a long, professional literary
and musical tradition. The Pale, on the other hand, has a tradition of
amateurishness…[which] has about the same relevance for the Irish nation as
would a column about bee-keeping in a tricyclists’ monthly journal.”1

Irish composer Seán Ó Ríada (1931-71) expresses disdain for Irish music that is
created in an Anglo-European art music tradition. He associates this tradition with “The
Pale,” the area around Dublin that was the center of British rule in Ireland from the
Middle Ages, and where formal musical training historically reflected English musical
instruction. Ó Ríada spent most of his compositional career trying to reconcile the burden
of an Irish ethnic music tradition with the aspirations of an emancipated Irish art music,
ultimately rejecting the possibility of Irish art music.2 It is necessary to discuss the terms
“folk” and “art” music, as they are ubiquitous considerations in Irish music. The concept
of “folk music” holds a strong appeal for wide audiences, from ethnomusicologists to
avocational musicians. Yet there is no established definition of “folk music,” and the
controversy around the term stems from the complex issues of identity, class, nationality
and ethnicity involved in defining it. William Cole provides both an academic definition
– “Music that has submitted to the process of oral transmission: it is the product of
evolution and is dependent on the circumstances of continuity, variation and selection” –
and a layman’s definition borrowed from Pete Seeger: “They’re called folk songs because

1 Seán Ó Ríada letter to Charles Acton, July 27, 1971, quoted in Harry White, The Keeper's
Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770-1970 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame,
1998), 144.

2 Harry White, The Keeper's Recital: Music and Cultural History in Ireland, 1770-1970 (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1998), 125.
4

folks sing ‘em.”3 Although the term “folk” connotes rustic, anonymous, or untrained
music to some people, none of these descriptors is requisite; Cooper writes about
melodies that “were treated as if folksongs, subjected to minor modifications and often
transmitted orally, even if they had originated as composed art music.”4 Similarly, Britten
eschews sentimental concepts of folk art as a product of primitive society: “Indeed the
whole conception of folksong as a germ from which organized music grew may prove to
be a false one. Literary research into the origins of the folk-ballad shows that it is an end-
product of an aristocratic art form, the epic…Folk-music most probably has likewise
been evolved from conscious art-forms, such as church music or the art of the Minne-
singers.”5
The term “art music” describes “music that is written down and that takes a more
or less established form to transmit some sort of artistic expression.”6 It is common for
composers trained in these established forms to incorporate orally transmitted traditional
melodies into their compositions. If the traditional melodies they use had national or
ethnic associations, however, these composers may ignite debate over whether the
resulting art music is any longer associated with that national or ethnic identity. This is
particularly true in Ireland, where England’s hegemonic influence causes a backlash
against imported devices. In countries with a longer history of independence, such as the

3 William Cole, Folk Songs of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1961), ix.

4Barry Cooper, Beethoven's Folksong Settings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 58.

5 Benjamin Britten, “England and the Folk-Art Problem,” Modern Music 18/2 (Jan/Feb 1941), 71-
75, in Paul Francis Kildea, Britten on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 31-35
.
6 Jane Bellingham, "art music." In The Oxford Companion to Music, edited by Alison Latham.
Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e422 (accessed May
31, 2012).
5

United States or Britain, the intermingling of art and folk traditions has been less divisive
than in Ireland. After becoming director of the National Conservatory of Music in 1892,
Dvorak encouraged American composers to base their works on folk traditions;
thereafter, scores of American composers have used traditional melodies. Combining art
and folk music in Ireland has not gone as smoothly.

What is Irish music?
In Ireland, “folk music” is sometimes understood to be “a symbol of sectarian
cultural discourse,” which implies that there are political ramifications when the term is
invoked.7 Thomas Davis, leader of the 1840s Young Ireland movement, published Irish
folksong arrangements in the Spirit of the Nation collection for the specific purpose of
rousing revolutionary sentiment against England. Davis exemplifies the way the issue of
“Irishness” in music has been inseparable from the relationship between England and
Ireland.8 Ironically, Davis and other Irish nationalist musicians turned to devices
imported via England – musical notation and Western harmony – to capture the melodies
they wanted to use to incite nationalism. While Thomas Moore was praised by many,
including Davis, for using folk melodies to promulgate the idea of autonomy for Ireland,
he was castigated by others, including Stanford, for “corruptions” of Irish material in the
way he “altered” melodies and texts and turned them into English parlor songs.9 Cowdery

7 Michael Murphy and Jan Smaczny, ed., Irish Musical Studies, vol. 9: Music in Nineteenth
Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 285.

8 Ibid., 269.

9 Charles Villiers Stanford, The Irish Melodies:The Original Airs Restored and Arranged for the
Voice (London: Boosey & Co., Ltd., 1895), xi, and Gerry Smyth, Music in Irish Cultural History (Dublin:
Irish Academic Press, 2009), 17.